The October Country (35 page)

It was noon the next day when we reached the lonely station after a hurricane trip across the jouncing meadows from the sea. Mr. Dudley Stone let the car have its head, while he talked to me, laughing, smiling, pointing to this or that outcrop of Neolithic stone, this or that wild flower, falling silent again only as we parked and waited for the train to come and take me away.

"I suppose," he said, looking at the sky, "you think I'm quite insane."

"No, I'd never say that."

"Well," said Dudley Stone, "John Oatis Kendall did me one other favor."

"What was that?"

Stone hitched around conversationally in the patched leather seat.

"He helped me get out when the going was good. Deep down inside I must have guessed that my literary success was something that would melt when they turned off the cooling system. My subconscious had a pretty fair picture of my future. I knew what none of my critics knew, that I was headed nowhere but down. The two books John Oatis destroyed were very bad. They would have killed me deader than Oatis possibly could. So he helped me decide, unwittingly, what I might not have had the courage to decide myself, to how gracefully out while the cotillion was still on, while the Chinese lanterns still cast flattering pink lights on my Harvard complexion. I had seen too many writers up, down, and out, hurt, unhappy, suicidal. The combination of circumstance, coincidence, subconscious knowledge, relief, and gratitude to John Oatis Kendall to just
be alive
, were fortuitous, to say the least."

We sat in the warm sunlight another minute.

"And then I had the pleasure of seeing myself compared to all the greats when I announced my departure from the literary scene. Few authors in recent history have bowed out to such publicity. It was a lovely funeral. I looked, as they say, natural. And the echoes lingered. 'His
next
book!' the critics cried, 'would have been
it!
A masterpiece!' I had them panting, waiting. Little did they know. Even now, a quarter-century later, my readers who were college boys then, make sooty excursions on drafty kerosene-stinking shortline trains to solve the mystery of why I've made them wait so long for my 'masterpiece.' And thanks to John Oatis Kendall I still have a little reputation; it has receded slowly, painlessly. The next year I might have died by my own writing hand. How much better to cut your own caboose off the train, before others do it for you.

"My friendship with John Oatis Kendall? It came back. It took time, of course. But he was out here to see me in 1947; it was a nice day, all around, like old times. And now he's dead and at last I've told someone everything. What will you tell your friends in the city? They won't believe a word of this. But it
is
true, I swear it, as I sit here and breathe God's good air and look at the calluses on my hands and begin to resemble the faded handbills I used when I ran for county treasurer."

We stood on the station platform.

"Good-by, and thanks for coming and opening your ears and letting my world crash in on you. God bless to all your curious friends. Here comes the train! I've got to run; Lena and I are going to a Red Cross drive down the coast this afternoon! Good-by!"

I watched the dead man stomp and leap across the platform, felt the plankings shudder, saw him jump into his Model-T, heard it lurch under his bulk, saw him bang the floor-boards with a big foot, idle the motor, roar it, turn, smile, wave to me, and then roar off and away toward that suddenly brilliant town called Obscurity by a dazzling seashore called The Past.

Mr. Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920. His family moved to Los Angeles in 1934 and he was graduated from high school there in 1938. After graduation he supported himself by selling newspapers while he began to write, and published his first story in 1940. Among his recent productions is the screenplay of
Moby Dick
, directed by John Huston and starring Gregory Peck. Mr. Bradbury now resides in Los Angeles with his wife and children.

His first four books, including THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN, brought Ray Bradbury the kind of international acclaim of which the following quotation from
Punch
is an example: "It is hard to speak with restraint of these extraordinary tales, which raise Ray Bradbury to a secure place among the imaginative writers of today." It is fair to say that FAHRENHEIT 451 took him a long step further forward in the critics' and public's eyes. Gilbert Highet called it "a wonderderful story." The
Nation
said: "One of the most brilliant over-all jobs of social satire to appear recently."
The (London) Times Literary Supplement
said: "Absorbing . . . it has the tactile and immediate quality of very clear sight, and the things seen are not ordinary."
The Listener
(London) said: "Bradbury's style is an organic expression of personality . . . supple, incisive, so moulded into his tale that matter and manner are one and indistinguishable." Simon and Schuster will publish in 1962 Mr. Bradbury's new novel, SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES.

ÿ